Antony Loewenstein

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on what elections are really about; the corporate press and business with the general populace mere bystanders:

Obviously, at least in theory, presidential campaigns are newsworthy.  But consider the impact from the fact that they dominate media coverage for so long, drowning out most everything else.  A presidential term is 48 months; that the political media is transfixed by campaign coverage for 18 months every cycle means that a President can wield power with substantially reduced media attention for more than 1/3 of his term.  Thus, he can wage a blatantly illegal war in Libya for months on end, work to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past his repeatedly touted deadline, scheme to cut Social Security and Medicare as wealth inequality explodes and thereby please the oligarchical base funding his campaign, use black sites in Somalia to interrogate Terrorist suspects, all while his Party’s Chairwoman works literally to destroy Internet privacy — all with virtually no attention paid.

Paradoxically, nothing is more effective in distracting citizenry attention away from events of genuine political significance than the protracted carnival of presidential campaigns.  It’s not merely the duration that accomplishes this, but also how it is conducted.  Obviously, how the candidates brand-market themselves has virtually nothing to do with what they do in power; the 2008 Obama campaign, which justifiably won awards from the advertising industry for how it marketed its product (Barack Obama), conclusively proved that; or recall the 2000 George W. Bush’s campaign vow for a “more humble” foreign policy.

That’s quite a “liberal” US President:

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama emerged as the consummate anti-war candidate. He wanted to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, funnel resources to the home front, and generally remedy the nation’s reputation as a global bully. Now, as the 2012 elections ramp up, he continues to carve a softer stance on foreign policy, telling voters that “the tides of war are receding.” But how much has actually changed? Neither disillusioned Democrats nor triumphant Republicans have had much data to go on. Until now.

In an exclusive analysis, Newsweek combed through a decade of military deployment history, and found only a faint line between the Bush and Obama presidencies. The number of American troops abroad has dropped less than 1 percent under President Obama, buoyed by what appears to be a sharp rise in the number of clandestine assignments, and curious growth in the number of personnel at Guantanamo Bay. None of the robust deployment trends begun under Bush have significantly abated. And since World War II, only President Bush has scattered a greater proportion of American might overseas: 39.5, 42.8, and 39.1 percent of American troops were abroad between 2006 and 2008, compared to Obama’s 39.3 percent in 2009 and 38.2 percent as of December 2010, the most recent date for which worldwide data is available.* Even with an aggressive—or, to some minds, reckless—drawdown in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, it would take nearly another 300,000 tickets home before the military was as united at home as they were on September 10, 2001.

My following lead book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

INFERNAL TRIANGLE

Paul McGeough

Allen & Unwin, $32.99

This unblinking collection of dispatches separates the rhetoric from the reality of the post-September 11 battlefields.

The new US Defence Secretary and former CIA director, Leon Panetta, recently told journalists the Obama administration was ”within reach” of ”strategically defeating” al-Qaeda but would still need to kill or capture the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.

It was a comment worth considering seriously. The US has hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, special forces in countless countries, drone attacks over at least six nations including Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, and military threats against many others, such as Iran. Yet the highest level of the US government now tells us there are only a handful of ”terrorists” who must destroyed.

Welcome to the post-Septem- ber 11 reality.

Experienced foreign correspondent Paul McGeough has followed these stories from the beginning, having been in New York on that fateful September morning in 2001. ”The whole of Manhattan is enveloped in a ghostly cloud of dust,” he wrote on the day of the attack.

This book compiles a decade in the field of battle, witnessing US- and Israeli-led wars. As McGeough commented in March this year, ”those brave enough to make a prediction [soon after September 11] would not have expected the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power to be the somewhat diminished world force that it is today”.

Imperial hubris has left Washington with an identity crisis that Barack Obama has only accelerated. The first US African-American president has, in fact, prosecuted whistleblowers more than any other leader in the country’s history and expanded covert actions around the world in the name of ”fighting terrorism”. It has made the US more insecure and close to bankruptcy.

Reading this fascinating collection of McGeough’s dispatches reminds us the past decade has been filled with spurious claims of spreading democracy, torturing in the name of security and backing Zionism in the misguided belief that occupying Israel is a reliable ally. McGeough bravely tackles all these myths.

McGeough documents the flailing war in Afghanistan and the delusional assessments offered by the Americans. In January 2005, he shows the official view of Washington towards the country: ”The US military – doing great. New democratic institutions – getting off the ground. First presidential election – planning well under way. Women’s rights – good things happening there, too.”

McGeough comments on this assessment with a tongue-in-cheek observation that President George W. Bush might not succeed ”finding a sure democratic footing in central Asia”. Indeed.

But this is journalism without glitz or cynicism. Rather, observational reporting that allows locals under occupation to speak truths about their situation. In Oruzgan province, where the Gillard government says Australian forces are helping to build democracy, McGeough wryly notes a comment in 2009 from a diplomat in Kabul that reveals the empty rhetoric of war backers here.

”We are supporting organised crime [in Oruzgan] and the people don’t like it.”

Imperial arrogance about Iraq was little different. McGeough wrote in July 2003, before the horrifying civil war engulfed the country and claimed up to 1 million innocent lives, that ordinary Iraqis won’t forgive the US for not providing adequate electricity in the searing summer heat. Eight years later, the US-backed Maliki regime, running death squads to eliminate opponents, still can’t provide sufficient power for the population.

An Iraqi technician tells the journalist that, ”we are beholden to the United States for ridding us of Saddam but they just don’t understand us”.

The most contentious sections of this book might be on Israel and Palestine. The local Zionist community has accused McGeough for years of being too critical of Israeli actions. For them, only complete obedience to the Israeli government line is acceptable. But, if anything, he could be accused of being too kind to policies in Palestine deemed illegal by international law.

McGeough isn’t afraid to document the endorsement of suicide bombing that existed in Palestine many years ago – hearing the stories of young martyrs wanting to die for the cause is both heart-breaking and tragic – and yet he places this desperation in its proper context. ”Palestinian researchers say they are discovering a generation of young people who don’t see a future,” McGeough noted in 2002. The reason is never-ending Israeli colonisation.

By the time the author presented a speech to Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas in 2010 on ”Controlling the narrative in Israel and Palestine”, he says Zionist ”mythology” has created a monster: an occupation with no end that still demands global backing. Boycotts and sanctions against Israel are now commonplace and rightly growing. Although, sadly, McGeough hesitates to fully acknowledge the Zionist entitlement to land, he doesn’t shy away from stating the bleeding obvious: ”There is no peace process.” The outcome is indefinite apartheid.

The book closes fittingly with an assessment of this year’s Arab Spring, a thoroughly convincing rejection of al-Qaeda’s nihilistic ideology. McGeough urges the West to forget about ”stability” in the Middle East – former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak might have pleased the US and Israel but he tortured his people for three decades – and dismiss the hypocritical bleating of people such as Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, who spent years supporting the autocrats.

Unlike so many writers who report on the Arab world, McGeough believes in the possibility of real democracy for the Muslim societies the West has long seen as little more than a reliable petrol pump.

More here.

Life is tough for an organisation that constantly speaks about high morals and noble wars and yet finds itself under the spotlight as a corporation that bullies opponents and conducts illegal acts in the name of “journalism”. Hilariously, Murdoch’s Australian today says the glorious empire remains glorious and dedicated to holding politicians to account. Apart from the ones who give them better business opportunities, of course.

Overland editor Jeff Sparrow writes in Counterpunch on the ways in which a billionaire frames his company as a voice of the people (and yet is believed by increasingly few):

It’s been fascinating to watch from Australia as the News of the World scandal engulfs Britain.

Rupert Murdoch himself was, of course, originally one of ours, and those antipodean origins are often cited to explain his self-perception as an outsider in international media, a crass colonial pitting himself against the stuffy clubmen who once controlled London’s newspapers.

The flagship titles of the Murdoch Empire have traditionally expressed this brash populism, boldly declaring Jack just as good as his PC masters, if not a damn sight better. The late Paul Foot described how Murdoch’s Sun built its remarkable circulation around the image of a ‘cheeky chappy’, a fellow who liked a pint and a punt and a well-endowed woman, and wouldn’t be told there was anything wrong with any of them.

That last point was crucial. The Sun didn’t simply know what its readers wanted but also upheld their values (even, or perhaps especially, their prejudices) against censorious feminists and snooty academics and stuffy bureaucrats and out-of-touch judges and other condescending know-it-alls, displacing class resentment into a cultural antagonism directed against the Left.

Now, there’s a long history of conservative idealisation of the Tory workman, a fellow hailed as patriotic, royalist to the bone and genetically immune to political radicalism (unless, of course, he goes on strike, whereupon he’s knocked to the curb as lazy and pampered).

Murdoch’s populism distinguished itself not so much by the way it encouraged its readers to kick down (against immigrants, homosexuals, black people and so on) but by how it encouraged them to kick up. It drew upon the New Class concept developed by conservative intellectuals (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, etc) in response to the sixties: a theory that posited the emergence of a white collar elite, identifiable by cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, liberalism and all the other notions that patriotic sons of the soil were said to despise. This New Class was supposed to have ensconced itself throughout society’s top echelons, particularly within the media and universities, a position from which it thereafter busied itself belittling and mocking the traditional pursuits of ordinary folk.

By expressing his outrage against, say, housing specially allocated to immigrants or the light sentences received by muggers, the cheeky chappy of a Murdoch tabloid cocked a snoot against the smug moralisers on his TV or in the upmarket papers, even as he aligned himself with the traditional priorities of the Conservatives.

You can see an updated and Americanised version playing out every night on Fox News, where the Aryan anchors perennially incite Joe Sixpack against the forces who would patronise him, from Hollywood liberals flapping their gums about gay marriage to pusillanimous Frenchmen who treacherously refuse to go to war.

By uncoupling the tropes of class from economics (indeed, from reaility), the schema facilitates a populist demagoguery sufficiently elastic so as to embrace almost anything. John Kerry might have actually been wounded in a conflict that George Bush assiduously dodged but Fox could still paint him as a pacifist elitist who sneered at patriots like W, largely on the basis that, though Bush didn’t fight, he looked like someone who would have.

The ‘Dirty Digger’ himself might have lacked the right accent, but even when he was first challenging the newspaper establishment, he was scarcely proletarian. Murdoch inherited his first paper, the Adelaide News, from his father, Sir Keith; he did his schooling at Geelong Grammar, a quintessential finishing college for the rich and entitled that also educated a young Prince Charles.

The journalist David Marr tells of attending a lecture in which Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son, denounced the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for drawing attention to his shenanigans in the mobile phone business: the particular program in question was, he said, a ‘disgracful and biased attack’ by ‘our media elite’. So powerful has the peculiar vocabulary of New Class anti-elitism become that a man born into the most powerful media dynasty the world has ever seen can still present himself, without any trace of irony whatsoever, as an outsider being done down by society’s rulers.

What does Washington expect when Israel is allowed to brutalise the Palestinians, drone attacks are killing countless civilians and Arab dictatorships are warmly embraced?

The hope that the Arab world had not long ago put in the United States and President Obama has all but evaporated.

Two and a half years after Obama came to office, raising expectations for change among many in the Arab world, favorable ratings of the United States have plummeted in the Middle East, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation.

In most countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration. The killing of Osama bin Laden also worsened attitudes toward the United States.

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, 30 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the United States (compared with 41 percent in 2009), while roughly 5 percent said the same in Egypt (compared with 30 percent in 2009).

“The very high expectations that were created in 2009 – there’s been a letdown since then,” said James Zogby, the president and founder of the Arab American Institute, of which the foundation is an affiliate.

Fewer than 10 percent of respondents described themselves as having a favorable view of Obama. The president’s ratings were the lowest on “the Palestinian issue” and “engagement with the Muslim world,” as the categories were described in the survey.

The poll was conducted over the course of a month among 4,000 respondents in six countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. Pollsters began their work shortly after a major speech Obama gave on the Middle East, in which he spoke broadly of his vision in the Middle East and pressed Israel, in unusually frank terms, to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.

The findings are largely in line with those of a poll conducted in the spring of 2010 by the Pew Research Center, which also found favorable views of the United States and Obama slipping. As with the new poll, Obama got his worst ratings for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Zogby said he saw the president about a month ago and mentioned that he was conducting another poll of views in the Arab world. The president, Zogby said, predicted that views of the United States would remain unfavorable because of the intractable nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Years after this scandal exploded, we’re still receiving details on US allies being far too willing to excuse and defend abuses:

Secret Defence documents obtained under freedom of information laws show an Australian officer, Major George O’Kane, was far more deeply involved in the operations of Abu Ghraib prison when terrible abuses of prisoners occurred than previously revealed.

The documents, which include extensive interviews with Major O’Kane when he returned from Iraq in 2004, reveal that as a military lawyer embedded with the United States he was a primary author of the manual for processing prisoners in Iraq.

He also advised on the legality of interrogation techniques being used on at least one detainee. Major O’Kane was instructed to deny access to the Red Cross to nine ”High Value Detainees” during their January 2004 visit because the prisoners were undergoing active interrogation and, according to the US view, fell under the exemption of ”imperative military necessity”. This view was contentious.

After his return he told superiors he was aware of rumours that the US had ordered an internal investigation of Abu Ghraib and it had something to do with photos, though his knowledge does not appear to have extended beyond a conversation with a US officer who assured him it was being investigated.

Although Major O’Kane’s role was discussed at a Senate inquiry in May 2004, he was not permitted to give evidence because he was said to be too junior.

He also did not attend US congressional hearings into the abuse, despite the documents revealing that the Democrat leader, Nancy Pelosi, personally asked the then prime minister, John Howard, to allow him to attend.

…

As point man for the Red Cross during visits to Abu Ghraib, Major O’Kane saw highly critical Red Cross working papers alleging abuses at Abu Ghraib and drafted responses for the prison chief, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski.

Major O’Kane was also aware that the US was hiding a high-level detainee – dubbed ”Triple XXX” in the US media – from the Red Cross. This had been done at the direction of the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Even more sensitive was Major O’Kane’s involvement in a highly secret mission referred to in the documents as ”Operation Eel”.

This involved the transfer of a high-value detainee from the US warship USS Higgins, anchored in the Persian Gulf, back to Abu Ghraib on December 16, 2003. The timing is significant because it was near the time of the capture of Saddam Hussein. This week Defence denied Major O’Kane was involved in the transfer of Saddam. But the documents and other sources suggest the detainee might have been someone who helped pinpoint Saddam’s last hideout.

”Major O’Kane did not observe any abuse of the suspect who was manacled and hooded during the transport operation,” the Australian Eyes Only report says.

In December 2003 and January 2004, Major O’Kane was involved in negotiations with the Red Cross for access to Saddam.

The elephant in the room for decades. We sell them weapons, indulge their fundamentalism and allow gender apartheid without comment. The moral bankruptcy of Western foreign policy could almost be summarised through its relationship with Saudi Arabia alone.

Here’s a fascinating new feature in Vanity Fair about the regime’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers:

In spite of the fact that it had almost immediately become known that 15 of those implicated in the attacks had been Saudis, President George W. Bush did not hold Saudi Arabia’s official representative in Washington at arm’s length. As early as the evening of September 13, he kept a scheduled appointment to receive Prince Bandar at the White House. The two men had known each other for years. They reportedly greeted each other with a friendly embrace, smoked cigars on the Truman Balcony, and conversed with Vice President Dick Cheney and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

There is a photograph of the meeting, which has been published in the past. This year, however, when the authors asked the George W. Bush presidential library for a copy, the library responded in an e-mail that the former president’s office was “not inclined to release the image from the balcony at this time.”

It would soon become evident that, far from confronting the Saudis, the Bush administration wanted rapprochement. The president would invite Crown Prince Abdullah to visit the United States, press him to come when he hesitated, and—when he accepted—welcome him to his Texas ranch in early 2002. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were there, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell and First Lady Laura Bush.

It seems that 9/11 barely came up during the discussions. Speaking with the press afterward, the president cut off one reporter when he began to raise the subject.

Now we know the Bush administration wanted personal information on leading Iraq war critic Juan Cole (who knew that writing a popular blog was such a threat to the US government?)

The former CIA agent who revealed this information, Glenn Carle, tells Democracy Now! why he was deeply concerned by the White House request and the obvious question remains; how many other dissidents of the “war on terror” have been followed, harassed or violated (in the US and also here in Australia)?

AMY GOODMAN: Why Professor Juan Cole? There were so many and are so many critics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why were they singling out him? Or, should I say, were they singling out him? Were you requested to do this on a regular basis?

GLENN CARLE: Yeah, well, that’s—it’s a question that comes to mind, of course, and people have asked me before. I only know what I know. And I don’t mean to quote Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, or paraphrase him. I know the facts concerning Professor Cole, and the instances that have been reported, they are accurate. That’s what I experienced. I don’t know of any other specific person.

I do know the context of tension and hostility between the Bush administration and the intelligence community, and more broadly, any critic of their policies. And the context at the time was intensely—well, it was extremely tense and quite partisan. The politics, we try to stay out of; in the intelligence community, of course, we cannot. And this was happening at a time when there was the whole Valerie Plame incident, Joe Wilson. One of my colleagues on the National Intelligence Council totally, without any intention or desire on his part, became embroiled in the presidential reelection campaign, when an offhand—not offhand, an off-the-record innocuous remark he made was seized by the administration as proof that the intelligence community was trying to undermine its policies. Nothing was further from the truth. He had been asked simply, “Didn’t the intelligence community know that there would be or assess there would be ethnic sectarian strife in Iraq in the event of an invasion?” And essentially, his answer was, “Well, yes.” But that was viewed as treasonous. So that was the larger context.

Noam Chomsky has won the 2011 Sydney Peace Prize over his legendary support for human rights and challenging power it all its forms. That makes him an enemy of a Murdoch empire that spends its entire time wanting to be intimate with government and business. The poor dears can’t understand why a man who opposes war is so feted. Why can’t war-mongers be given equal public billing?

Today’s editorial in the Australian is a classic example of a genre known as war lovers unite in fury/envy/bitterness/comedy:

Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky is the perfect choice for this year’s Sydney Peace Prize. Not only is he in step with previous winners such as journalist John Pilger and Palestinian activist Hanan Ashwari, but the intelligentsia who gave David Hicks a standing ovation at the Sydney Writers’ Festival will no doubt rise to the occasion again. Chomsky is an especially interesting choice for a peace prize in the 10th anniversary year of the World Trade Centre attacks — as an apologist for Osama Bin Laden.

The Sydney Peace Foundation has shown its true values and vision in honouring a man foundation director Stuart Rees describes as “inspiring” and whom he expects will attract thousands of admirers who will want to express their gratitude. Perhaps in some sort of Mexican wave of self-loathing.

Others share Professor Rees’s enthusiasm. In 2007, Osama Bin Laden praised the US academic for his “sober words of advice prior to the (Iraq) war” and said he was “among the most capable of those from your side”. Not to be outdone, Chomsky recently denounced the killing of bin Laden by US forces as the “political assassination” of an “unarmed victim”. Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that Chomsky also believes that the “crimes” of George W. Bush “vastly exceed bin Laden’s”, that he lamented the West’s treating Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya as a “punching bag” and erroneously described Ronald Reagan’s great legacy as that of a “scared bully”.

Sydneysiders might also like to honour Chomsky for his wit and wisdom in defining education as “imposed ignorance”, a concept he helped turn in to reality with his theories about “universal grammar”, which contributed to the erosion of English teaching in US and Australian schools from the 1960s onwards.

Unlike one of Chomsky’s acerbic US critics who recently branded him “a two-nickel crank”, we look forward to his Sydney speech, where he will be among friends collecting his $50,000 gong. But we hope he leaves the Hezbollah military cap he wore in Lebanon at home. If the Sydney Peace Foundation wants to turn its back on its usual puerility, it should consider awarding next year’s prize to The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, whose cogent case against continuing the war in Afghanistan made Chomsky’s rantings look pedestrian.

Barack Obama made a conscious choice when taking office to Look Forward and Not Back after eight years of illegal torture committed by the Bush administration.

Tom Engelhardt unpacks this legacy:

To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched.  Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.”  (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.)  In response, wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ‘literally speechless.’”

The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low-level (see England, Lynndie and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.

Very narrowly:

Discussing a draft declaration from South American and Arab State leaders, a United States government operative lists a series of “anti-American digs” against the US and Israel that were later excluded from the text.

What is considered anti-American is stunning and revealing. This quiet, unassuming cable shows a bizarre and expansive US foreign policy agenda in 2005.

Among statements considered to be anti-American:

• Reaffirming the necessity of resolving all conflicts non-violently;
• Emphasizing the importance of respecting the unity, sovereignty, and independence of Iraq, and not interfering in its internal processes;
• Committing to implementing all UN resolutions non-selectively;
• Recognizing the need for protection of intellectual property, but not when it affects national development, especially in terms of national health policies;
• Emphasizing the need to eliminate distortions (subsidies) in agriculture, which impede developed nations from exploiting comparative advantages;
• Welcoming the recent entry into force of the Kyoto Agreement, and calling on the international community to better protect the global climate.

The cable also described aspirations for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East as “anti-Israeli sentiment”.

An unusually clear window into a USG operatives’s worldview at the time.